Out for Blood (1992)

Don “The Dragon” Wilson, Esq. It’s the sort of phrase that conjures up a variety of dream-like images. There’s the one where Don The Dragon is doing research using Westlaw and gets so excited to find a case on point that he karate chops his secretary through the office water cooler. You could also be excused if you imagine The Dragon objecting to some bit of damning testimony so vociferously that he actually splits the counsel table in half while pounding on it for emphasis! And then there’s all those billable hours for “kicking the shit out of hostile witness” and “ex parte beat down of trial judge.”

Considering the positively abominably silly possibilities of forcing The Dragon to actually practice law in a movie, Out For Blood does a good job of not really letting his occupation as attorney have anything to do with the movie. The Dragon’s legal beagle stuff is confined to him wearing a shirt and tie and eyeglasses while sitting in his office once or twice and asking for a case file. He also beats up two thugs at a courthouse.

All in all, I think you’d agree that this is precisely the type of lawyer stuff we want from The Dragon. And what we want even more and thankfully get is to have The Dragon’s family brutally murdered right before his eyes!

It was going to be the perfect weekend! The Dragon, Mrs. Dragon, Dragon, Jr., and The Dragon’s dog are all hanging out at the docks in the middle of the night (they have a boat there) when they find themselves right smack dab in the middle of a big drug deal!

Through the overuse of hazy flashbacks throughout the movie we see The Dragon desperately trying to remember what happened that night to his family. He knows they were viciously killed right before his eyes, but he doesn’t know who did it!

The Dragon though isn’t content to just pound back homemade memory pills provided by his shady psychologist and wait around for the world’s biggest and stupidest coincidences to unravel the plot for him! He’s bound and determined to kill the middle part of the movie by prowling the city streets killing drug dealers as local vigilante, Karate Man!

Karate Man is pretty cruddy as far as heroes go. He’s just The Dragon in a black sweatsuit and The Dragon does absolutely nothing to hide his face even while doing his business in front of witnesses!

Still, he did punch a guy clean off a roof. And killed a guy by force feeding him a bag of cocaine. And caused two guys to get set on fire when Karate Man rammed a van into their drug lab. He also shot a bunch of guys. Come to think of it, Karate Man was actually pretty awesome!

Now just because Karate Man is out trying to avenge his family’s death, doesn’t mean that he also can’t find time to avenge the boner in his pants. Thus he hooks up with a local art dealer named Joanna.

She knows his psychologist and is also mixed up with a local mobster. Her previous boyfriend also turned up dead and it was supposedly a suicide, but the cop (Lt. Croft) harassing The Dragon during the movie about his Karate Man antics advises that they were investigating her for murdering him! That particular plot element is never resolved, but what does The Dragon care? He wasn’t THAT boyfriend!

Out For Blood is a pretty routine Don The Dragon effort, not as good as CyberTracker or Blackbelt, but it won’t leave you concussed like Red Sun Rising or Moving Target. Still, the last third of it is filled with twists and turns that don’t make sense except that they need to occur so that The Dragon can wrap things up with a big finish.

The bad guys kidnap his girlfriend and rely on the old “let’s hope The Dragon manages to hear this phone message in time so that he knows where to go for the final showdown” gimmick.

It’s a particularly punch-drunk strategy in this case since if you want to lure The Dragon somewhere to kill him and you decide to leave a message at his girlfriend’s house, why don’t you just stake out the girlfriend’s house and kill him there when he goes to check her answering machine, which they apparently are relying on him to do anyway?

Even if you can overlook that, it’s difficult to explain why when The Dragon shows up at the airfield where the bad guys are holding his girlfriend that they just don’t mow him down with their various guns. Instead, they have one guy get into a kick fight with The Dragon while everyone else stands around watching!

And then the head bad guy appears and explains everything for no reason other than the movie needed to explain the horribly obvious doublecross. Of course, the doublecross makes no sense either! Why did the bad guy kill The Dragon’s family, but let him live? And why haven’t they killed him yet at the airfield?

The Dragon made this movie for PM Entertainment and it’s at the end of the movie when PM suddenly seems to remember that they are involved because we finally get a decent chase scene and explosion.

It all comes to a stupefyingly stuntacular conclusion when the bad guy suddenly ends up in an old World War II era fighter plane with The Dragon chasing after him in a jeep. The Dragon even manages to jump onto a wing!

Again, what was the bad guy’s plan here? Had he planned to fly off in this plane from the very beginning? Why? And what about the rest of his crew? If it was all improvised, why was there a pilot with a gassed up plane just sitting there waiting to take off when there had just been about an hour of continuous gunfire at the airfield?

By the time Joanna’s mobster friend appears to get involved and Lt. Croft tells The Dragon that they’ve decided that Karate Man was actually a good idea and they want to work with him, you’re left feeling a bit like you were Karate Man’s most recent victim.